Soo today was interesting. This morning I arrived at the office as usual but was a bit concerned and not sure what to work on – Various programmer guys were making progress on programming that I am not able to help with, and I felt pretty useless. Every Tuesday morning at 8:30 there is a seminar, so after checking my e-mail and twiddling my thumbs for ½ an hour I went to that. It was awesome. This woman was presenting on her methods of engaging with the communities, called Education Through Listening. She described the technique by forcing the whole audience to participate and asked people to role play, etc. as she demonstrated on us. Afterwards, I acted like a barnacle and sat and listened to her and Steph talk about how Steph can integrate the techniques into her malaria drugs in pregnancy study. I also thought a bit about how incredibly relevant it is to my project (and presumably everyone's). For example, we received our first report last week, but it turned out to be "invalid" because the cow didn't actually have central nervous signs but was actually just in heat. Whoops. So was the animal health reporter over-zealous or did he not know how to recognize that the cow was in heat? What about the cow's owner? I'm not sure, I wasn't there when the animal health assistants responded to the report. My goal on Thursday when I next go to the field is to follow this technique through several levels - ask questions to prompt the animal health assistants to talk about how they can ask questions and listen to educate the animal health reporters on how to ask questions to listen to educate the farmers so that they learn from reporting to us whether or not the report is valid.
This vague thinking led me to wonder how much the farmers really do know – so I'm gonna find out with some semi-structured interviews and also attempt to find out what happened to the never-analyzed data from a previous attempt to find out what people know about enteric zoonoses. Then I'll do a repeat survey later on and see how successful the project has been in terms of education. Okay, by "I" I mean "Eric" because I do not speak Luo. I'm thinking of taking lessons but I also want to improve my Swahili which will presumably be more generally useful in life/East Africa, but I guess Luo could come in handy in the distant future at some point.
In other awkwardness, it turns out that Emmanuel, the guy I met at one meeting and that subsequently confessed his love for me and has been trying really hard to buy me drinks ever since I ran into him at a club a few weeks ago, is the same guy that I desperately need help from on web form-based data transfer and storage.
Alright but the main point about today is that this morning, and even through lunch, I was feeling unproductive and inadequate. Then this afternoon, in addition to thinking about interviews, I met with people working on three different kinds of programming for me – the lab guys that need to put a way to enter our samples into their tracking system, the scannable form guy, and the PDA programming guy. All of these meetings led to suddenly booking up my whole week with more meetings and lots more work for me! Plus, tomorrow two women vets from the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) that are doing a participatory epidemiology study related to One Health are coming and I have A LOT to talk to them about! Yay!
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